New York Times: The Ghosts of Clinton Street: NORA GERAGHTY and Dan Kahn moved into the four-story brick house on Clinton Street in the summer of 2001, a week after graduating from college. By day, their life resembled that of any young couple in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn: coffee from a patisserie on Court Street and commutes on the F train to entry-level jobs in Manhattan.That was by day.By night, the couple retreated to a world suspended in time, a house in which virtually nothing had changed in the hundred or so years since a construction crew had arrived at the door bearing a supply of the miraculous invention known as electrical wiring.Ms. Geraghty’s great-great-great-grandmother bought the house at 312 Clinton Street for $4,000 in 1866. At the time, an outhouse stood in the backyard and horses were quartered next door. For the next 140 years, a period spanning Brooklyn’s consolidation with New York, the family discarded practically nothing: not the trunks of hand-woven bedspreads and frilly Victorian undergarments, not the boxes of handwritten grocery receipts dating to the 1880s, not the chunks of petrified laundry starch now piled in a 19th-century beer pail called a growler. [Full Story]
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